Sounds like a bitter St louis writer. It was a great idea and opportunity to acquire a gomez had gomez not forgotten to play the game. I was a cespedes guy but wasn't upset for trying to make the team better. If jeff stops trying to acquire pro hitters then you can say he's failed.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">From <a href="https://twitter.com/dgoold">@dgoold</a> on <a href="https://twitter.com/TMASTL">@TMASTL</a> the <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/STLCards?src=hash">#STLCards</a> interest in Carlos Gomez: It's legitimate curiosity. It was legitimate before the Holliday injury.</p>— Tim McKernan (@tmckernan) <a href="https://twitter.com/tmckernan/status/764109727768993792">August 12, 2016</a></blockquote> <script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
This is a extremely poorly written piece. A St. Louis writer who obviously just dislikes Luhnow. He definitely hasn't been perfect but the Astros are lucky to have him leading the way.
Look, Luhnow has not been perfect, but he has the organization from top to bottom moving in the right direction. I'm good with that. I'm not happy with all of the moves that have been made, but no GM is perfect. Doesn't surprise me that a St. Louis writer will speak negatively about Luhnow.
Ridiculously terrible sour grapes article. He mentions the Aiken fiasco, with absolutely no mention of Bregman. He fails to also mention that none of the traded commodities from the Gomez trade are thought of as can't-miss/elite type guys. He's also written off the Giles trade without any sort of context regarding VV's injury history or Giles' dominance since the bad April. Never seen a city or organization as spurned and vengeful as STL is towards Luhnow... and this is a city and organization that typically goes out of its way to be ultra-nice. Luhnow must just be a bad breaker-upper.
Also Correa is absent! He was far from the #1 choice. Can you imagine being stuck with Byron Buxton right now?
Not even going to bother giving him a click based on the responses. But did he mention that the Aiken fiasco ended with Aiken tearing his UCL and requiring TJ in the end? I feel like that piece is still ignored nationally.. I also saw that Mark Saxon is reporting the Mets might outbid STL. The return might actually be something more than straight org depth if we're lucky.
No... but to be fair, the Astros never suspected he would tear it or require surgery... just that if he did, it could possibly be a more difficult repair. Speaking of him... any more updates on Aiken? I saw some initial reports when he first started throwing, nothing since.
Wasn't their position that, due to the (under)size of his UCL, that it was more likely to rupture/tear/break (whatever it does)? That was always my understanding of the situation.
I actually looked into him a couple of weeks ago. He has been giving up a lot of runs and pitching very few innings per "start" in rookie ball. But he was striking people out at least..
Well, IIRC, it was a medicla issue and thus, not something the Astros could legally discuss. Most of the information came from his camp, right?
I believe Nick was right about the Astros' position. The concern was the abnormally small UCL and how it would affect a Tommy John surgery/recovery. From my medical understanding (both my medical degree and watching UCL repair videos on youtube), the replacement ulnar collateral ligament is usually grafted to the torn native UCL during surgery. I assume the thought process is to provide some stability to the graft during healing. The medical question was with the abnormally small UCL (/nothing additional to tie the graft to besides the bony anchors), would a person undergoing Tommy John surgery be able to recover normally. Nobody knows. It definitely was not simply an issue was being at higher risk or already having a torn UCL. Plenty of medical experts were rolled out on both sides. The Astros got scared and offered the lower number because they couldn't be sure of a typical UCL recovery like Lucas Giolito or Erick Fedde. The pro-Aiken people were saying 'we can't predict what type of recovery will happen so the Astros shouldn't have cut the bonus offer'.
There you go. He got promoted to low A ball since I last checked, but otherwise the same...nothing happening, but it is a super small sample and coming off TJ. I suspect we need to check in after ~12 months to really have any idea.
I feel bad for Aiken, not about the situation how it turned out, but that he'd already grown into being an entitled athlete (his support group must have sucked, it was all about richest beyond anyone's wildest dreams). I could see him requesting the biggest contract in all of sports if he'd ever of made an all star team. He's getting a taste of humble pie. I think another thing that soured the negotiation was getting Mac Marshall, he was viewed as a difficult signing, and it appeared the Astros needed Aiken to give up a little more money to make it happen. With all the talk about Correa, McCullers, Rio, Phillips, of the 2012 draft, people probably whispered in his ear to be weary of the Astros shenanigans. But a 7+ ERA in rookie ball is pretty telling.
